Planners have been trying for several decades to spread out the peaks of rush-hour traffic. Pollution from roadways disproportionately affects non-white communities. Roadway construction often displaces low-income residents and residents of color-both historically and today. Roadway construction also presents equity concerns. Furthermore, large roadways create barriers that disconnect communities. Roadway expansion may induce more driving, which presents significant negative externalities, including pollution and traffic crashes. They present significant opportunity costs because they often occupy valuable urban land. They are expensive to construct and maintain governments in the US spent over $220 billion on highways in 2016. While roadways present many economic benefits, they also have many costs. Roadways are sized based on peak hour travel rather than overall travel. In addition to congestion, reductions in peak hour auto traffic have implications for infrastructure design. A small reduction in peak demand on a congested roadway can cause outsized reductions in traffic congestion. Even if traffic volumes return to pre-pandemic levels, differences in the temporal distribution of travel demand may lead to changes in congestion levels. However, congestion is caused not by overall traffic volumes, but by volumes at the peak hours. The COVID-19 pandemic caused massive reductions in automotive travel and thus in traffic congestion, but now traffic volumes have returned to near-pre-pandemic levels. Congestion is associated with significant local air pollution, though global effects are unclear since congestion also discourages travel. Delayed freight shipments present a cost to businesses. Congestion imposes significant costs on the traveling public through lost time and uncertain arrival times. Congestion is a frequent target of interventions from both traffic engineers and planners, who seek to reduce congestion for a variety of reasons. Traffic congestion is common in urban areas. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. MWBC received no specific funding for this work. įunding: SZ: This work was supported in part by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Award DGE 2040434. The DOI isn’t active yet in the meantime the data can be seen at. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Data relevant to this study are available from the UNC dataverse at DOI. Received: SeptemAccepted: AugPublished: September 13, 2023Ĭopyright: © 2023 Bhagat-Conway, Zhang. It may be possible to reallocate road space to other uses with fewer tradeoffs in terms of traffic congestion.Ĭitation: Bhagat-Conway MW, Zhang S (2023) Rush hour-and-a-half: Traffic is spreading out post-lockdown. As the peaks spread, some highway construction project may prove unnecessary. Roadways are generally sized based on peak-hour demand. In addition to decreased traffic congestion, this finding also has implications for infrastructure investment. We find that peak-hour automobile travel is spreading in the post-lockdown period. In this article, we examine the temporal distribution of highway demand in California, using data from over 3,500 traffic sensors. However, the temporal pattern of demand may differ, due to increased remote work or other factors. As lockdowns eased, traffic volumes returned to near-normal levels.

One impact was a drastic reduction in travel, leading to free-flowing traffic conditions in many previously-congested cities. The COVID-19 pandemic presented a significant disruption to transportation systems globally. Because of the negative effects of congestion, governments invest billions of dollars into the highway system to try to reduce congestion and accommodate peak-hour automobile travel demand. Congestion is associated with a slew of negative effects, including delays and local air pollution.

Traffic congestion is ubiquitous in major cities around the world.

Peakhour review